“You’re going to have to stop dodging eventually!” Dahl shouted out over the courtyard, laughing, swinging his two-handed broadsword with one hand as carelessly as though he were whipping about a piece of cloth.
We’d been fighting on and off for nearly twenty minutes now, and I had blocked precisely once, the force of which had nearly broken my arm, my sword likely only holding together due to the Rift energy spiraling through it. I didn’t care to repeat, which meant my strategy currently involved a lot of running and putting obstacles between us.
Dahl didn’t seem to care, seemed content to let me have my mobility. He probably thought I’d get tired eventually.
I wasn’t sure he was wrong.
“That seems like it would be a tactical error,” I responded, taking the moment of conversation to pause, the fountain between us, keeping a wary eye on his form for any flicker of movement. He’d proved he could be incredibly fast already, and I wasn’t going to forget that.
Our commotion had brought out exactly one spectator– a man from the Cathedral, wrapped all in black cloth, the marking of one of Dahl’s servants and loyalists. He had poked his head outside at the noise and then promptly gone back within the Cathedral, following which I had heard the boom of the bar being lowered on the other side of the door to lock it. There would be no help coming from there, not that I had expected any. No one in the Highlord’s Manor seemed to have stirred yet.
Dahl laughed again, the madness raging in his eyes. “You could have been so free, Elyon!”
“If I bound myself to you and strangers from another land? That doesn’t sound like freedom to me.”
“I am not bound to them,” Dahl hissed, momentarily enraged at the prospect. As quickly as it had come, it fled, and he returned to smiling. “We could have been partners.”
“Partners to do what? What is it that you’re trying to accomplish aside from your own gains?”
Dahl tilted his head at me slightly. “The advancement of our people, Elyon. The faithful have always believed in an ascension, and now the path has been made clear to us, opened before us.”
“I wasn’t aware ascension was in the Chantry doctrine, but, then again, I’m just a common heretic.”
“It’s in the doctrine of humanity,” Dahl insisted. “Where else would be headed if not to gain a greater place before the Fates? Why else would we be the only survivors from the Purge? When the Ascendants rose up in rebellion, we alone stood with the Fates and survived the monster that descended from the sky. And now we have been blessed.”
“You have an interesting definition of blessed. Not to mention, didn’t these breakthroughs of yours come from another world? Another world with other gods?”
Dahl snarled at me. “The Fates rule all. They can use all methods.”
“Including having a heretic like me destroy you before you can pervert their land with otherworldly, demonic teachings? You’re using demon instruments to accomplish these goals, after all. Not to mention the torture and murder of innocents. Doesn’t really seem like something Palados would like all that m–”
My argument against his hypocrisy was cut short as he launched himself at me, over the fountain, his sword pointed downwards in an attempt to impale me against the stone.
I rolled aside, losing my balance slightly as the ground itself shook from the force as he landed, the sword piercing through the cobblestone and cracking the area around it, leaving a crater in his wake.
I stumbled less gracefully than normal to my feet and moved to hurriedly put more distance between us again.
That, however, had been loud.
Two guards exited the Highlord’s Manor to check out the area and the commotion we had been making as we fought.
“Get out!” I snapped, but somehow it was still too late.
Dahl threw his blade and it impaled one directly, piercing straight through his armor and driving through the Manor itself, pinning him to it as he stared in shock at his partner, choking on his own blood before Death took him.
Dahl laughed loudly and moved towards both his blade and the other soldier, advancing slowly, predatorily.
I ran up behind him and somewhat abruptly plunged my blade through his back. The Rift-enhanced steel cut through his armor like butter despite its own enhancements, and Dahl fell to his knees, choking on his own blood. I knew, though, in my soul, that it wasn’t going to last.
“Run!” I snapped at the guard who was still standing there in shock.
He did run, but not back into the Manor. Rather, he ran past us both, towards the gate.
I had a feeling I knew what he was doing, and I honestly didn’t want any backup. “No, don’t–” I started, but then Dahl stood up.
Having been distracted, I lost my grip on the blade still stuck in his back and, in fact, all the way through his body, and I was forced to leave it there as he turned around in order to put distance between us again.
The soldier stopped in the gate, his eyes widening as Dahl simply smiled at me, sword still poking out of his chest, and then lunged forward.
I didn’t have enough time to get away considering his extra, teleporting reach, and his gauntleted fist hit me in the chest. I went flying, landing several yards away with at least two broken ribs, groaning softly. I turned to look at the guard who was still just standing there. “Get. Out,” I hissed, and my own eyes lit up with violet flame as Rift Energy knitted my ribs back together, at least temporarily, as I stood.
The guard fled.
Dahl had recovered his sword from the corpse and the Manor wall, and I drew my other blade, turning to face him, now from opposite ends of the courtyard.
We were, unfortunately, likely to have company soon, so with that in mind, I stopped carrying on a conversation with the man, going on the offensive and running straight for him.
I remembered my conversation with Keric– based on what I was fighting, it seemed that Dahl had successfully triggered a partial, or gradual, transformation of himself into one of the beasts that plagued our land. To what degree his remaining sanity and intelligence would survive the process was yet to be seen, but it clearly wasn’t completed yet. Considering his strength, speed, and healing capabilities, it seemed Keric had also been correct that he was drawing his power from the very air around us. I couldn’t very well stop him from existing, which left the other option– just kill him as many times as I could to see if I could wear out his resistance to death.
Or maybe he just had the healing, and nothing more. Either way, lopping off his head seemed like a good place to start.
Dahl seemed a mixture of surprised and delighted as he moved his larger sword in the way of my initial attack. “Oh? Have you stopped running?”
“I’d like my sword back,” I said mildly, dodging under a swing he took and using the opportunity to slip behind him. My blade was truly wedged in there, having sliced clean through him. I noticed the way it was glowing and frowned. The Rift energy seemed to be eating away at his armor. Of course, it wasn’t likely to hurt him, but it was interesting.
I dodged another attempt at smashing me into the ground on Dahl’s part and ended up back in front of him.
“That seemed a prime opportunity,” he noted.
“I got distracted,” I admitted.
“I have to admit,” he said, as we reengaged our dance, “I was expecting a little more.”
“Devastation is more dramatic when you’re carving through an army and not worried about destruction of the landscape.”
“Why would you care if this city burns? It’s done nothing but spite you.”
“Yeah, but I worked so hard on it, you know?” He attacked and I moved as though to block, twisting my blade at the last moment and setting the sharp end of mine against the point of his. My swords were infused with demonic energy; his were not. With the force of his blow, my blade carved his sword in half, down to the hilt and through half his hand, cutting through it all the same.
The sword clattered to the ground, split in two, and Dahl looked down at his mutilated hand. “How do you do that to your swords?” he asked legitimately, sounding probably the most sane he had since we’d begun this conversation.
“Trade secret.” I could have pressed the advantage, should have been carving off his head right now while he stood there, surprised. I didn’t, though; my eyes were on his hand.
It wasn’t a human hand.
As it knit itself back together, it became clear that his “hand” was a strange, elongated paw, still with fingers and thumb, but with long, curved black nails, covered in thick fur, a mix of white, black, and gray.
Dahl followed my gaze and then smirked, a dark look entering his eyes. “I suppose there’s no point in hiding anymore. I’ve been given a gift; I may as well share it. Besides, this armor isn’t doing me much good.” His body shifted, growing and elongating; he cut his armor free of him using his claws– it fell off of him and clattered onto the cobblestone as he cut the straps, though my blade remained in place, impaled through his chest. He was covered in the fur, and though his face maintained a human semblancy, he dropped down on all fours, his body turning lanky and unnatural, lupine but longer, with sharper teeth.
Dahl smiled with too many, extremely pointed teeth, his voice a low growl. “Shall we resume our dance then?”
“Actually, I think I’m getting done.” I charged.
Dahl was stronger than me, but I was used to that. Strength wasn’t where I relied; the enhancements that I didn’t use had made everyone stronger than me on the field of battle. The problem was that he was fast– somehow even faster now that he had undergone this transformation of his and moved to all fours. He moved not like a human anymore, but like one of the Riftlings, deeply reminiscent of the way that I had watched them destroy and devour the Aeron troops during the battle at the Aldras River.
I had a plan though. I just had to figure out a way to get behind him, and that was just going to take patience for the opportunity.
We danced.
Dahl had forsaken his broken blade for just the claws, but they were sharp and more resistant than even his blade. No matter how much energy I poured into my blades on impact, they would not cut through his nails, even though I knew from the blood stain still on his fur and my other sword still embedded in his chest that they would cut through the rest of him easily enough. I had a theory that his claws were made of the same stuff as a Riftling carapace, resistant to Rift Energy, but now wasn’t exactly the time for scientific experimentation on the subject.
The fountain cracked and shattered; the cobblestones were destroyed further in other places and were occasionally ripped up by his brutal lunges. I tried to keep the destruction to a minimum, but this was requiring more of my concentration than I had been forced to give in years. I felt a thrill that I hadn’t felt in a similarly long time– the thrill of something approximating an equal fight.
But the opportunity came.
I was behind him, in the midst of a roll, and I could see the handle of my sword sticking out of his back. I reached out with my hand and snagged onto it, tearing it sideways slightly with the momentum of my movement.
Dahl howled, a horrible scream to the moon, writhing in an attempt to dislodge me.
I grabbed onto the handle with both hands and then pushed off the ground with all the strength I could muster, giving some extra kick to my jump with a spark of Rift energy, dragging the sword with me.
Dahl split in half from the torso upwards, dark red blood that was tinged purple flying over the courtyard, into the broken fountain, and splattering over a considerable amount of my coat and some of my hair.
I hit the ground, breathing heavily, leaning a bit on my blades, still feeling the pain of my ribs from earlier. I slowly turned around to watch, to look– and found the two halves of his upper body slowly and with horrible wet noises, like rubber boots in the mud, stitching themselves back together, strands of Rift energy forming the string and pulling the fragmented pieces back into a single whole.
When Dahl turned to look at me, I recoiled again.
His face had healed off kilter, the right half just barely higher than the left, making every bit of his expression a distorted parody of itself, like a glimpse of a horrible reflection caught in rippling water before it was swiftly washed away. He snarled at me, mismatched mouth grimacing. “That,” he hissed, his voice as broken and twisted as his body, “was unpleasant. I’ll have to show you what it’s like.”
I gripped my swords a little tighter.
It was a wonderful time for company to arrive. The gate to the courtyard crashed open, and Ialdi marched in, in full Peacekeeper armor and regalia, flanked by the guards and captains she had been able to gather at this hour– and followed by my friends.
Gasps of shock and astoundment went around the ring as the guards poured along the edges of the courtyard, giving us room.
“Do me a favor, Dahl, and wave to the crowd,” I said, taking the moment to breathe, knowing this was far from over.
Dahl laughed, a deep and guttural sound. “Do you think they will help you? Do you think you can stop me?” he hissed.
“No, they’re not going to help. They’re just going to bear witness.” With that, I turned to the crowd. “Ialdi! Keep them back! They’ll just get in the way.”
I saw Tiana’s eyes flicker over me, roam over the monster, and look at her terrified soldiers. “Keep a perimeter!” she ordered. “Just don’t let it escape.”
The dance resumed.
Truth be told, I was getting tired. My ribs hurt; every blow I couldn’t fully dodge and had to engage with even in the slightest jarred my entire body, took my whole strength not to give up ground. I kept pulling more and more Rift energy to myself, infusing my body with it as well as I was able, but it didn’t cling to me the way it did to him and it did less against him than it would have against another. Riftlings I could have tricked, but he did still maintain his intelligence.
I could have killed him again, though, of course. I had several opportunities that I let slide; it wouldn't have been permanent, obviously, and II didn’t want to show the soldiers that he was immortal. It wouldn’t have done anything good for anyone for them to know what he was. Keric’s theory had said I needed to exhaust his sacrifice, but he hadn’t seemed to lose anything the last time I had ripped him in half– except maybe more of his humanity? Frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted him to keep losing that right now.
The dawn sun was staring to peek over the horizon, and still we danced. I was beginning to think the only way to try and end this would be to demolish his body a second time and use the opportunity as he put himself back together in order to dice him into little pieces and see if that would successfully remove him from the world of the living. Maybe it would overcome the healing, or maybe it would count as enough deaths. It was hard to find such an opportunity, however; a normal killing blow wouldn’t work. It needed to destroy his body.
Out of the corner of my eye, I would catch glimpses of terrified and awed soldiers, as well as the stunned face of Jesne, the calculating expression of Raesh, and the slightly worried look on Hector’s face that grew more pronounced the longer the dance continued. I wondered if he could see all the opportunities I was missing, if he knew I were passing them up on purpose, or if he thought there was something very wrong.
I looked at them for slightly too long, a hair too distracted, and missed the signs of Dahl’s movement. He hit me again, this time raking his claws across my chest before he tossed me the width of the courtyard.
I groaned and got my feet under me as quickly as possible, readying up for a potential follow up, though I wasn’t even sure he would do it. Dahl was enjoying himself; I could tell.
I blinked the fog out of my eyes from hitting my head and froze, momentarily stunned.
Hector was standing in front of Dahl, between the two of us, and Dahl had a massive hole blasted in his chest.
The monster looked just as surprised as I was as he collapsed.
Hector turned to me, a proud smile on his face, and I understood too late.
He didn’t know.
“Get away!” I started running, but it was too far. “He’s not de–”
An inhuman, beastly hand sprouted from the center of Hector’s chest, covered with and surrounded by blood.
Hector looked down in shock before all the breath left him in a whoosh.
The hand withdrew, and he collapsed on the stone ground.
Dahl snarled down at him, the wound in his chest already having repaired itself. “How do you like it?”
I was pretty sure I hadn’t actually crossed the distance between where I had been when Hector had fallen and where I was now. Space itself seemed to have bent to accommodate me in that moment because, without traversing half of the courtyard, I was standing next to Dahl. I jumped and brought my blade down on his neck.
His grotesque and malformed head severed itself from his body and fell– but not completely.
Strands of Rift energy snapped out from his stump of a neck and grabbed onto his skull, gravitating it back in place.
For the first time, I neither hesitated nor cared.
His legs came off next, then his arms, then his torso split down the middle. Dahl howled again, a horrible wrenching sound that cut off in a horrible choking one as I sliced directly through his lungs.
The beastly form finally collapsed on the ground, still repairing itself as fast as I could damage it, but rage and adrenaline had overpowered any sense of caution or reason. The more important part was that I could damage it as fast as it could repair itself. Unfortunately, the regeneration was getting faster, and I would only ever be able to get slower. Despite knowing this, I did not stop.
Finally, Dahl was able to leap away from my blade before it could connect, and he looked at me with the eyes of an animal more than the eyes of a person. He looked at me, he looked around, and he ran.
I started to chase him, but he was headed towards the Cathedral– he lept up two stories and landed on the balcony, then again onto the roof, climbing his way up to the spire while I stopped and watched, unable to follow.
He howled once and then jumped down, over the wall, his silhouette visible as it ran across the roofs of Ildanach until it crossed the final wall and vanished into the night.
My grip briefly tightened on my swords, feeling a strong urge to chase him, to trap him and torture him with infinite pain until he just told me how to kill him, until he would do anything to make it stop.
Hector groaned behind me.
I dropped my blades on the stone, the clattering sound echoing in the sudden silence, and then I ran to the side of my brother and friend.
“So–” Hector coughed, and I held his head. “That’s why you weren’t… killing him….”
“Don’t try to talk,” I said quietly, looking down at his chest, ripping off a solid portion of the bottom of Hector’s own shirt to put pressure on the wound.
“We both know I’m dead,” Hector said, voice strangled. “Seen… enough battle.”
“No. Not like this.”
“Honored… to fight… with you,” he whispered.
“Stop it. You’re going to fine.” I didn’t know how, but it was true. I couldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it. He would not die like this.
And Hector smiled at me, just faintly, and then closed his eyes.
There was, once again, silence in the yard.
It was Ialdi who walked up beside me a few moments later. “I’m sorry.”
“I need a skiff,” I said, voice tight, and I stood to look her in the eyes as I said it.
Either the Rift energy had stopped burning in them, or she had seen too much that night to be startled by it, because she didn’t flinch from my gaze for even a moment. “Leon–”
“Keeper,” I snapped. “Lend me. A skiff.”
She blinked and then nodded. “You have it.” She offered me a key from her pocket right then. “You have mine.”
I accepted it with a brief nod and then took a shaky breath before going back over to pick up my blades, cleaning and sheathing them. Then I went and knelt next to Hector’s body, picking him up in my arms, despite how considerably larger he was, despite how my body felt like it was about to break.
“Leon–” Ialdi began again, but this time I just wholly ignored her, heading for the gate.
No one stopped me or tried to say anything else.
The dawn sun was barely over the horizon, so I didn’t run into many on the streets. Those who I did see gave me a wide berth– covered in blood and holding a corpse in my arms as I was. I almost laughed at the horrible image I must have presented.
It was a long walk to the outskirts of the city, a long way to gently lay Hector’s body in the back of the skiff. My mind felt like it was blanketed in a fog.
“Where do you plan to go?”
I spun, somehow never having noticed that both Raesh and Jesne had followed me the whole way.
It was Raesh who had asked the question, who was eyeing me as though I might snap at any moment.
“The Temple,” I said, though I hadn’t thought about it until precisely that moment.
“The one in the forest?” Jesne asked.
“No.” I didn’t expound, though I did attempt to think through the fog for just a moment, to hold it together for just another few seconds. “Jesne, you’re going to have to answer their questions as well as you’re able. Give them something, anything for an explanation. Make them clean out the Church; one of Dahl’s loyalists came out and saw us fighting and then just barred the doors. They need to do something about that. Raesh, make sure no one kills her in the process.”
Raesh arched an eyebrow briefly and then just nodded. “Are you going to be coming back?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t know when. I’ll have him with me when I do.”
Both girls frowned. “Leon, you know he’s–” Jesne began.
“He can’t die like this,” I snapped, and there was such viciousness in the tone that both of them leaned back from me slightly.
I took a breath and repeated, calmer. “He can’t die like this.” And with that, I simply climbed into the skiff and started driving.
